Health concerns have been rasied after a lab worker at a pneumonic plague research institute in Siberia fell ill and died in undisclosed circumstances.
Local media named the worker as Darya Shipilova, an employee at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East.
WATCH THE VIDEO ABOVE: Russian lab worker dies after potential plague exposure
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There are conflicting reports about how and where the 28-year-old had fallen ill, but authorities said she had died of pneumonia of as-yet unestablished origin.
Authorities have quarantined around 200 potential contacts and no further cases have yet been confirmed.
Professor Paul Griffin, Infectious Diseases Director of Mater Health Services, told Sunrise on Tuesday, if the infection was a case of pneumonic plague and more cases were likely to emerge, they would be known by now.
“We haven’t seen any other suspected cases, and because of its short incubation period and that person unfortunately died on the 2nd, we should have seen cases by now if there were any that were likely to arise,” he said.
Even if more cases were to arise, Griffin said authorities have taken a “really comprehensive approach” to the case.
“There’s been nearly 200 people hospitalised out of an abundance of caution. They’re being closely observed and treated with antibiotics,” he said.
“The good thing about this organism is, because it’s bacterial, antibiotics work, and if you give them early, you can prevent infection in contacts and that’s what’s happening there.”
‘Very different’ circumstances to plague pandemic
While the underlying disease may be very similar to what it was hundreds of years ago, Griffin noted the world is very different today than it was when the plague last ripped through the world.
“Hundreds of years ago, when this destroyed nearly half the world’s population, we didn’t have testing for it, we didn’t have treatment for it, didn’t understand it, couldn’t contain it,” he said.
“We haven’t seen a case of this organism in Australia since the 1920s, and if we were to see a case outside of the one that we’re hearing about potentially being related, we could very easily contain it and treat any cases.
“This isn’t really something that we have a concern of spreading.”
Plague research still necessary
Despite the worst of the plague emerging 700 to 800 years ago, Griffin said there are still 1000 to 2000 cases recorded across the world each year.
“It hasn’t gone away, which is why research keeps happening and why this person was working on that organism,” he said.
“We need to do research. We need to make sure we can continue to find where the organism is and have tests and other measures to counter it. That’s why research happens.”
He said there were “very strict” precautions in lab settings when workers handle organisms of this nature.
There have been reports of a lab incident where Shipilova broke a test tube with live bacteria inside it before her diagnosis.
Griffin said these reports have not been confirmed, nor has it been confirmed that it was this specific organism that caused the rapidly progressing pneumonia that led to her death.
“There’s still a lot more information we need to get,” he said.
“I think it’s very unlikely that there was an incident where someone might have been infected in that sort of an environment.”
Plague is endemic to Siberia, the location of the first known prehistoric human outbreak, as the bacterium that causes it, Yersinia pestis, is present among the small wild mammals in its vast wilderness and their fleas.
It is rare for Russians to fall ill with plague; however, cases in other parts of the world, notably Africa, occur every year.
Authorities have urged people to remain calm and said there was no evidence that the woman’s death was linked to her work.
– With Reuters
